JULES DE BALINCOURT
Posted by Fabio 26 October 2010
Escaping any easy categorization, Balincourtʼs work can be at once figurative and abstract, narrative and dream-like, down-to-earth and mysterious.
Heavily influenced by American culture, Balincourt has often depicted the contradictory facets of the United Statesʼ social, political and economic landscapes. In some of the works, the artist clearly addresses us with simple painted phrases, such as Your Technology Fails Me, or sends us a message to Coexist. For Balincourt, “the text serves as a grounding element in which the purely formal attributes [of the abstract paintings] are negated, creating a sort of visual and logical conflict or resolution.”
In other works, he appeals to our yearning to escape, either to exotic, tropical beach settings, or through the image of Clint Eastwood as the lone cowboy in a Western movie. Balincourtʼs universe is built out of powerful imagery, in vibrant colors, often depicting scenarios of urban or social utopias.
Jules de Balincourt was born in 1972 in Paris and moved to the United States in the early 1980s. After obtaining his BFA in 1998 from the California College of Arts in San Francisco, he moved to the East coast and graduated from Hunter College in 2004 with Masters degree in Fine Arts Master.
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